Library of Congress Interview with Edwin McCammon Martin The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR EDWIN MCCAMMON MARTIN Interviewed by: Melbourne Spector Initial interview date: April 7, 1988 Copyright 1998 ADST Q: Ambassador Martin has had a long and very distinguished career in the U.S. Government, the Department of State, and the Foreign Service. I will not recap here any part of that because we hope he will do it himself in his own words. Thank you very much, Ambassador Martin. MARTIN: Thank you. I appreciate the privilege of telling the story. My father was a YMCA secretary for most of his life. He had passed the bar exam, but his first couple of cases were nasty divorce cases, and he said, “This is not for me.” So he moved around for a few years before taking a job with the Dayton YMCA. Dayton, Ohio, was home for both my mother and father and I was born there in 1908, but we lived in Piqua, Ohio, about 30 miles north of Dayton, for five years, then in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We moved to Trenton, New Jersey, and then to South Bend, Indiana, and then back to Dayton, where I graduated in 1924 at just 16 from Steele High School as they had done, earning an award for having the best grades for a male but behind 3 females, and in 1925, back to Piqua. It's an Indian name. My father was a broad-minded YMCA man who had scholarly interests and joined whatever Protestant church was in the neighborhood, not narrowly minded in this respect. Interview with Edwin McCammon Martin http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000753 Library of Congress He had had the good fortune in a summer training camp, at Silver Bay on Lake George, N.Y. to be in the class of the very distinguished theologian, Harry Emerson Fosdick, who preached a social gospel, which became my father's approach. Q: You could make that one today. We experienced some technical difficulties with the tape. Shall we go back and try to pick up some of the gaps? MARTIN: Yes. Q: We are back in the happy days of the Epworth League. MARTIN: The Epworth League of our Methodist church speech was when I was going to high school in Dayton, Ohio. I think I was describing a speech I made at its annual dinner in which I was reflecting to some extent things my father had said, the waste of money in advertising, which does not produce a product anyone uses. How much better off everybody would be if, instead of advertising, there were other cheaper means for people to know where they could buy this or that at what price. It would be a highly economical reform. And that was perhaps my first going on record—I was 14 or 15 at the time—of my views on this subject. My father's brother was also a YMCA secretary in the Chicago area, and lived in Evanston, Illinois, had two children considerably older than I was that I admired and that led me to decide to go to Northwestern University from which they had graduated. I managed to get a scholarship paying my tuition of $250, for which I did some work in the Chemistry Lab. I lived with a Mrs. Tomlinson who had been a high school friend of my mother's in Dayton and married a Northwestern graduate who was then an officer of the leading Evanston bank. I cut the grass, kept the furnace going in the winter and helped her with some of her outside activities to pay for my board and room, except for lunch. Interview with Edwin McCammon Martin http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000753 Library of Congress I then had to stay in Piqua for a year, because my father was ill. I worked part-time and took courses at the high school in public speaking and shorthand. Then I went back to Northwestern and graduated in 1929. I waited tables in my fraternity house, Phi Delta Theta, and did various other things, including working in the public library half-time for a year. Then my senior year, I was half-time in the personnel office, interviewing freshmen about how well they were getting along and what problems they had. In addition, I had a fair number of outside activities. My junior year I was on the debating team and a member of Delta Sigma Rho, the debating fraternity. At the end of my junior year, I made Phi Beta Kappa. I had three letters in tennis at which my father, an enthusiastic player, started me at 8. My coach was an English professor whom you had to beat to be able to be kept on the squad. We got one racket restringing a year. Otherwise, we paid for everything that was required. My senior year, I was a member of an elected honorary society, Deru, of 15 male students, which started the first men's union, and I was secretary-treasurer of that. I was president of the YMCA my senior year also. My father having been a YMCA secretary maybe helped me. I won the election by the vote of the retiring president. When I worked in the personnel office I learned that on the Entrance Intelligence Tests, given by Northwestern because its President was a psychologist who had produced the intelligence and related tests used to help make wise assignments of the soldiers coming into our military for the first time during World War I, I had made a score of 99+ out of 100 possible, the grading being on the basis of your rank among the 700 or 800 freshmen taking the test. Not because I was a Republican as I voted in '32 for the Socialist candidate, Norman Thomas, but for the political experience, I served as a poll watcher in the '32 election for the Republican candidate for Congress from the North Shore Chicago area. He won. Interview with Edwin McCammon Martin http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000753 Library of Congress After graduation in 1929, I stayed as a graduate student in political science and economics [my majors were political theory and public law, basically, but government regulation of business especially, so economics was important]. The YMCA connection got me into my first problem with the anti-communist movement in the United States. In 1932 I helped the student YMCA arrange a meeting of students on the depression problem, so serious then, in the light of the upcoming election. As its speaker I got the head of the leftist but not at all communist Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota. There was a woman in Evanston who had a reputation as an anti-red lobbyist, and she got the local American Legion to protest the meeting, alleging the speaker was a communist. The University canceled it. I arranged to get a leading Chicago lawyer to make a speech at the Garrett Theological Seminary, which is on the Evanston campus but a wholly separate institution, on the value of freedom of speech. The chairman of the political science department of Northwestern chaired the meeting. It was well written up in the Chicago Tribune. (Laughs) To pay my way as a graduate student, I was proctor, which meant living with and helping with special education programs, for the Austin Scholars, named for the man that funded their program. Ten high school seniors from all over the country were picked each year to train as business executives. They got $500 a year for four years and $1,500 for a year abroad, but they couldn't join fraternities; they had to live together separately. I spent three years as their advisor, being paid $1,000 a year. I might add, with respect to the Austin Scholars, that it was very difficult to select, as I helped to do, seniors in high school who someday would be able to be and want to be business executives. One of them became a writer for the New Yorker magazine, and a couple became lawyers, but we did have some successes in business. Then for a year I was a special assistant in a course “Introduction to the Social Sciences”, doing student counseling and paper grading. One summer, I was a special assistant in a course on the history of political theory, which was still my particular interest. There was no Interview with Edwin McCammon Martin http://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib000753 Library of Congress pay so I worked at the cafeteria of a nearby motel serving drinks and deserts and slept on pillows between the stacks of books in the basement of the Social Science Building. I taught a course three hours a week the last couple of years on American Government. All this slowed me up a bit, but I finished everything except my doctoral thesis. In early 1935 I was told that the '34-'35 academic year was my last at Northwestern. In April 1935, a White House agency called the Central Statistical Board wanted to recruit an additional professional, and they sent a former professor there to the University of Chicago to do so. They had a very strong program in public administration and related matters. He hired Lewis Sims from there, and then he came up to see a friend of his who was Dean of the Business School at Northwestern, but also an editor of the American Economic Society Review, with whom I played tennis occasionally. He mentioned to the recruiter that I was at loose ends for the coming year and he ought to talk to me.